"I’ve been doing paperwork in Mexico City, signing thing after thing.
However, some doubt arose concerning my identity. The nine-year-old signature on my passport did not match the one I had been putting everywhere, on everything. I had mistakenly assumed we accepted the way a signature degrades over time, how it grows hastier, less sure of itself. The authorities didn’t accept this degradation, no, and requested an in-person appearance to re-sign all the things.
Here you must choose a signature and commit. A señor hovered over me as I tried to perform my name the way I once had—upright, tense, and contained. (Lately it had gone soupy.) He examined my new effort, compared with my nearly expired passport.
He pointed to the t. The horizontal line needed to be longer, so I lengthened it, and was thus recognized, by Mexico, to be myself."
-- from an essay in Untitled Thought Project, via Harper's magazine.
I have had the very same thing happen in a US Passport office. I had to do it several times.
ReplyDeleteThis is why signatures are such a great way to get rid of unwanted votes.
ReplyDeleteAlso, signatures are bullshit. Used to be a form of authenticity but that reality only exists legally, not in reality. Yet somehow, the US refuses to move on to much better forms of authentication. Most other countries are moving in that direction with Iceland and Estonia are particularly advanced.
One key problem is that such electronic systems require a good digital register of the population. Americans resistance to creating such a register because they don't trust their government. Which at the moment is not unfounded. However, when raising this argument, they ignore that the government already does know everything about them anyway via the Social Security Administration, IRS, DMV and voting registration.
So to express their distrust of government, Americans allow their lives to be much more miserable than they need to be. Once you have a proper people's registry and authentication, things like voter registration and identity theft simply disappear. But sure, let's all trust our paper SSN cards as a form of identification.
To mock the use of paper signatures at work, I sign most of them with my pink marker, as obnoxiously big as I can make them.
My signature has devolved from a mostly-legible cursive when I was a teen to a variable wavey slash these days. I do have to forge my own teen signature every time I vote because they compare them to validate my ballot, so I am occasionally disenfranchised.
ReplyDeleteThe place I have noticed it is in signing in to access a safe-deposit box. 25 years' worth of signatures, gradually evolving.
ReplyDeleteThat (the 25 years of signatures) would make for a nice photo in a blog entry. Probably not, from security and privacy aspects?
DeleteLike the cat paintings of Louis Wain?
Deletehttps://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/qevqbi/schizophrenia_art_progression_of_louis_wain/
Yes - you could see your signature going schizo! :-)
DeleteLike the bottom one here...
Deletehttps://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2019/10/russian-cursive-looks-like-scribbles.html
I will add to the chorus of those whose signature has changed over time. Further, I used to use my full middle name, later switched to a middle initial, and now often just use first and last names. My high school signature used rounded letters akin to the cursive that I learned in elementary school, and my current signature is far more angular with dropped and abbreviated characters. So far, my checks still get cashed. I think my signature has been challenged in an election, but it was "cured" with a second attempt to sign.
ReplyDeleteOn the more general question, signatures were meaningful in times past but are currently little more than curiosities. In support of this statement, when was the last time anyone actually looked at your signature? For me, it has been more than 20 years (not in this century). With the current trend of signing electronic screens, signatures have descended far below scrawls and are tending toward the "X, his mark" range. I have a friend who routinely uses a smiley face and is never challenged.
In contrast, the Chinese use a chop and (in the law) have only a limited appreciation for a signature. A chop is similar in concept to the rings-and-wax seals of old in Western cultures. I had one carved when I was in China (it takes time, so a friend arranged for it and shipped it to me when it had been carved). A person's chop is applied to legal documents where a signature would be used in the West. Furthermore, corporations have official chops that are kept in corporate safes and brought out to sign contracts. The ARM corporation had a problem in 2022; the China CEO was fired but he kept posession of the corporate chop in order to retain control of the corporation. Headline "Arm China finally boots rogue CEO that's held it hostage with a 'chop' for years".
https://www.pcgamer.com/arm-china-rogue-ceo-ousted/
Further information on the chop, see Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seals_in_the_Sinosphere
The writer Idries Shah, in his book The Natives Are Restless, has a very funny story about the time he was in a Beirut market and found a man selling "Idries Shah signatures" for about twenty pence in the local currency.
ReplyDeleteWhen I asked for one the man concentrated for a moment, and then inscribed my name on crimson paper in gold ink, with many a flourish. It looked far more impressive than the real thing. Why, I asked him as I pocketed it, did he not sell originals? It seemed that they were ‘difficult to get, he is a most busy man, you see.’ Was a copy as good? ‘Ya Sidi, O Sir! Most people here cannot even write…’
Would the man whose signature he was forging, this Idries Shah, I asked, not object to such a trade?
‘Such a man, Sidi, written about in the newspapers, and a man of learning, undoubtedly a man of generous habits, surely would not grudge me a living?’
No, I supposed not. Besides, I reflected, next time I felt like being a bit reckless, I could write my name down a few times on a piece of paper–and throw it away. Even twenty pence is money.
He should have written out a dozen original signatures and given them to the man to sell.
DeleteWho would believe him?
DeleteRather than degradation, my signature has suffered annihilation.
ReplyDeleteThere was a man in Australia, Jared Hyams, whose signature was a phallus. He managed to have it on quite a few different pieces of ID before it got refused. It went through the court system . The government department refused on the basis that it was sexually harassing their employees. He lost but it inspired Hyams to go to law school. I heard an interview with him and he was speaking about how weird the idea of signatures is - that you write your name in a very special way and it represents you. Rather ironic that many kids now just print their name. I also saw an interview with a man from Japan whose signature was a bear, but in Japan, they have individualised Hanko stamps, which perform the same role as our signatures. When he arrived in Australia, he had to sign something and it had to be explained to him, but his signature is a cartoon drawing of a teddy bear.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.smh.com.au/national/melbourne-man-faces-stiff-opposition-to-penis-signature-20160107-gm0sx6.html
The first time I bought a car, the salesman would sign documents by drawing a circle over the signature line a few times, almost like he was circling something for emphasis.
ReplyDeleteI asked about it and he said it was easier after signing his name so many times a day for years.
I had a proper signature then I was put in charge of the quality system at work, which seemed to involve endless signatures and initials. After a few thousand signatures, I was just waving my hand at the page and whatever took was a bonus.
Delete